What is something that was common when you were young but would be weird today?
Example: Pogs (round paper plugs) in glass bottles of milk
or: Lining up in gym class, where they inoculated one kid after another using an injection system that reuses the same needle.
or: Gun clubs at school
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Street lights coming on indicating to go home.
Apparently due process of law.
Parents not knowing (or caring) where their kids are all day.
Equal rights.
Popular cartoon characters in animated cigarette commercials telling you how smooth Winston cigarettes are, and then smoking.
I’m thinking phone books. We had stacks of yellow pages, some from previous years just in case we had to call someone who wasn’t in the newer editions.
Imagine dedicating 2-3 feet of cabinet space for phone books that were rarely used but you felt compelled to keep them because that was the thing to do?
The federal government upholding the constitution.
Smoking in hospitals, restaurants, schools, office buildings, airplanes….
A milk man made a daily delivery. He’d place the bottles next to the back door.
Being sent to the store to buy cigarettes for your parent/guardian (in my case, my grandmother)
Smoking and hot meals on a flight
Showering after gym class at school.
Parents having no way of knowing where I was or being able to contact me.
Kids in my high school used to bring rifles to school and would place them in their lockers. After school they went hunting.
They didn’t use the same needles. They used the same syringe and dosing bottle.
My answer is: Children with guns was ok in many instances. I had a rifle or a shotgun from the age of 10 and pretty much carried them freely out in the country.
High-quality stereo systems with speakers that produced excellent sound.
Evening newspapers.
Having a town pedo.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, everyone knew who the local pedo was and we just stayed safe.
Smoking anywhere
Lots of smokers.
Getting your ass whooped for misbehaving in front of anyone and everyone.
Men in their early twenties dating High School students
Taping songs off the radio so you could play it back.
You’d wait for an hour or more for the song to show up. Then you’d have to hit record at the right time.
Hopefully, the DJ wasn’t talking too much over the beginning or end of the song.
Listening to popular music on AM radio.
One obvious one, at least in the US, is smoking almost everywhere.
Another one is having a station attendant pump your gas instead of doing it yourself. I heard this is still a thing by law in NJ but I haven’t seen this in decades in the US Southeast.
Getting a paddling at school and when you got home getting a whipping because you got a paddling at school
I don’t remember them using the same needle… jeez did they?
Back in my day kids were allowed to fight back against the other kids that assaulted them. These days, the victims get disciplined, and THAT is weird to me.
My pops taught gun safety at the club at school! lol
Charles Chips potato chips delivery. Yum!
Corporal punishment in school.
Seeing a police car actually patrolling the neighborhood. When I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s, the cops would drive through occasionally and stoo to talk to you. You knew them as Officer Bill or Tom etc.
Postal Orders as a method of payment.
Leaving your kids sit in the car while parents went in to have a beer on the way to the cabin.
Teachers throwing chalk at you when you weren’t listening
Not having to pay to meet people to date (Bumble and Tinder) just paying once to own music, video games or movies (no subscription) and water not sold in stores
Conversations over family dinner without phones.
Phone booths
No freaking phones. Thank goodness
A bank of pay phones
Riding in the back of the family station wagon and my grandfathers pickup with no seat belts.
Manners
In high school, we had a smoking lounge for STUDENTS. We were in a tobacco producing area in North Carolina.
Rotary telephones and Saturday morning cartoons.
There use to be gun cap rolls all over the street when I was a kid in the sixties.
Weighing kids once a year at school.
Party line on phones
Making mixtapes of your favorite songs for your friends. Some people even decorated the cassette box labels. When someone gave you a mixtape, it was special because you knew it was a labor of love.
The big Sears Catalog.
When I was in High School, it was fairly common for students to have pocket knives. When on school-sponsored camping trips it wasn’t uncommon for many of us to openly wear belt knives, and quite a few would bring hatchets or machetes as part of our camping equipment.
The prevalence of knives wasn’t a problem during fights, because if you pulled a knife during a fist fight it indicated that you were both weak and a coward.
We also had a rifle team until the Clinton Administration banned such things (about 5 years after I graduated). The sad thing was that the school was required to destroy the weapons rather than sell them. Seemed like such a waste.
However, even after that, for a few years anyway, If you walked through the student parking lot, just about every pickup truck had a gun rack. If someone forgot to remove a rifle, security would let the office know & the student would either drive it home, or call a parent to come collect it. No police necessary
However, NO ONE was allowed to go swimming at a school-sponsored event or trip unless it was the swim team practicing or competing. Because some kid had drowned on a field trip at some point in the county’s history.
Life in Semi-Rural Florida.
Smoking area in high school
Drinking and driving was not illegal. If you were in an accident the cops would drive you home and tell you to sleep it off.
Our FFA went hunting on opening day. You were allowed to keep your gun in you locker but not take it out. Nearly everyone the parking that had a truck had shotguns in the gun rack in the back window year round.
Massive CRT TVs being fastened above everyone’s heads at school. When they first started doing that, I thought there was no way they wouldn’t fall and take someone out.
Being able to play with a wood burning on the livingroom floor while watching Bugs Bunny.
Department store catalogs the size of a phone book
Milk & cream were delivered,the tops of the glass bottles covered with small squares of cellophane. Wigwam burners at the lumber mill. Telephone party lines.
Boys and girls having separate play areas called yards at school. We also lined up to go in when the bell rang. No mad rush allowed.
Telephone books
The amount of people you could fit in a car, crammed in the back seats, the foot wells, in the boot…
Answering the phone every time it rang.
Also, collect calls.
Sears, Penny’s, Montgomery ward, catalogues!
Phone booths in every city
Still have gun clubs in schools at least here in oklahoma.
18 year old drinking age.
I may anger some on this one, but competency. Way back last century when I was young, it seemed as if in more cases, things that needed to be done were done with competency, and people took pride in being good at their jobs.
Now, people only seem to know what the computer tells them. Everyone is very sorry but they can’t do anything and don’t know anything.
I suspect one of the big reasons for this is that back then, companies were more loyal to employees, people were paid better, and we had unions.
Going to the movies to see a double bill or triple bill
Paper catalogs especially the Sears catalog. We would go through and circle the toys we wanted for Christmas. The toy section was always in the middle for some reason. I guess it was to make you flip through the whole thing to find it.
My dad generally drove while holding a beer. Completely legal in Texas when I was growing up.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck.
In Kindergarten, I had some rx meds from the doctor I needed to take during the day. I remember my dad just put a couple in a ziplock bag and off I went. Gave them to my teacher and told her what time I was supposed to take it. That was that, no questions asked.
I also missed my bus the same year. My teacher asked if I knew how to get home and when I said yes, she put me in the front seat of her car and drove me home.
Knowing how to read a map and being able to get somewhere without turn by turn instructions
Latch key kids. Kids would walk home from school and stay alone until parents come home from work. Parents would go out for date night without babysitter for 10and 12 year old. We would cook frozen dinners and watch tv; mom would call and check on us every hour. We were fine and kinda liked the independence.
Getting along with other people despite their political leanings.
Playing flashlight tag outside
Writing a letter, on paper.
Gilbert Skilcraft chemistry sets with lethal combinations of chemicals and a Bunsen burner. The even had a version with an actual radioactive isotope.
I’m 46, so barely old enough to post here, but I remember when my high school first announced that we weren’t allowed to bring guns to school anymore. Lots of kids had gun racks holding hunting rifles in their cars before that.
When I was a child my dad bough a six-pack on Fridays to drink on the drive home from work, which was perfectly legal at the time.
Rifles and shotguns in racks in the back of pickup trucks in the HS parking lot during hunting season.
Any adult being able to rebuke any kid and have the kid change his behavior, at least for the moment.
Riding in a car and not wearing seatbelts.
In the 70s, seatbelts were there, it’s just that very few people used them. Children in the front seat, sitting on someone’s lap going 70 mph down the highway.
We had reproductive rights.
Tranistor radios…the little ones that we carried around and held up to our ears LOL…
“Cruisin” Jack in The Box
“Jock checks” in middle school gym class where you would display you were wearing a jockstrap by pulling one of the straps down your leg to prove to the gym teacher you are wearing one.
Getting “whipped” at school if you broke the rules
Indoor smoking. As a little kid (born in late ’79) people smoked in the supermarket (and put the butts out on the floor), the mall, the movie theater…EVERYWHERE. I’m so glad this isn’t a thing anymore.
Drinking and driving as a popular pastime
Smoking on airplanes
Do they still give the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) in high schools? I went to a public high school in the southeastern U.S. about forty years ago, and they took part (or all? – I don’t recall for sure) of a school day to give every student in my grade the test. I am guessing that this isn’t done anymore.
Calling the operator to request an emergency breakthrough
I can assure you they did not use the same needle. How old were you?
Spotting beer. Kids would ask adults going into liquor stores to buy them beer. About 50% would oblige.
Paper boys.
Manners and courtesy
Life without a mobile phone
First a definition. “Collect Call”: Back in the day, there were pay phones all over the place. If you didn’t have coins in your pocket to make a call, you could call the operator and ask her to ask the person that answered the phone if they would accept the charge for the call on their account. If they said yes, they would see the charge in their next bill. If they said no, the operator closed the line.
After wrestling practice I’d find the nearest pay phone and call my parents “collect” in order to let them know that they can come pick me up for a ride home. When my parents answered their phone, the operator would ask if they would accept the charge for the collect call. They would always answer “No.”. That was a free way to communicate without paying the cost to use the pay phone.
Going up to girls in public whom you don’t know very well, and striking up conversations
cold-approaching people to strike up conversations
using encyclopedias or card catalogs
We were never inoculated with the same needle. The device you are referring to used high pressure air to inject the vaccine. We (healthcare) did away with is around 1994 because of fears that body fluids could rebound back into the gun and be injected into the next person and potentially spread HIV.
I was in the military at the time an was an officer in charge of a vaccination team. It cause quite a ruckus when when we had to come up with a new way to administer 100s of vaccinations a day,
The Yellow Pages
Writing checks for everything and keeping a check register
Honor, Truth, & Integrity
Tattoos. I don’t understand why they’re all getting inked.
Home economics classes in junior high school, with gender separation. We girls learned sewing in the seventh grade and cooking in the eighth grade, and the boys had shop class both years.
Leaving your kids in the car when running errands. I remember sitting in the car for what felt like hours at a time while my mom grocery shopped, etc. That would get the cops called today, or in my area, take the risk of your kids being in the car when someone steals it.
Standing naked in line for the showers while our gym teacher stood there marking our names off that we actually took a shower 😧 1966- 1967
I was the oldest sibling growing up on a farm plus both parents worked. Nobody, I mean nobody, ever knew where I was or what I was doing from dawn to dusk.
The smoking area outside our high school.
Allowing your young child to stay at the house of a friend without meeting or talking their parents first.
Hitching
Rolling your hair up in paper rollers if you couldn’t afford the foam ones. Sheesh. Do people still use foam rollers?
12 year old babysitting an infant
Gym uniforms, milk in glass bottles at school, no answering machines, buying smokes for your parent, starting your car in winter to let it warm up and just walking away without locking it
No body wanted their parents to drop them off or pick them up. It was embarrassing. The whole drop me off a block away thing was very real
Using safety pins, or worse yet, a type of garter to hold your maxi pad in place. (Tampons weren’t around until a little later).
Telephone party lines (shared phone lines). Phones attached to walls with plugs. LOL.
Typewriters.
My grandmother told me not to put coins in my mouth because a N might have touched them.
rotary dial phones, phone booths
Gang showers after a 50 minute PE class. Today they are 90 minutes and a dousing with body spray.
That injection system in gym class did not use a needle. It worked by air pressure forced through a hole the size of a needle and hurt 10 times worse than the needle would have.
Drive-in movies. Highlight of my childhood.
Straight up racist jokes. Especially Polish and Mexican jokes But jokes about black people too.
Cigarette vending machines.
After school specials, tv show theme songs with lyrics, mall hair
Walking to the corner store for candy.
Standing in the kitchen, on a landline wall phone, trying to talk to your boyfriend when the egg timer tells your dad you talked too long. 😂
Seeing a 6-yr-old going downtown alone on a city bus.
Nuclear attack drills where you would get under your desks with hands behind your head and face between your knees
Also bring sent to the store with a note from your parents to buy them a pack of cigarettes. And yes, that really happened
Stalking your crush was considered romantic
Creative, original music and movies.
Cassette tapes, rotary dial phones, no trains to Britain (had to take ferry or plane), all clocks, watches, etc. being mechanical with needle dials. No electronic calculators.
It was not the same needle. It was air-injection.
It was considered rude to use the phone at the dinner table, at restaurants and when hanging with friends.
Paul Lynde sightings.
Labor unions.
Washing machines with a mangle on, in people’s back yard.
Sanity
Spyder Bikes with banana seats and high rise handlebars.
A strong man show where they rip a phone book in half
Running short on cash at the grocery and the clerk telling you to just bring in the rest tomorrow. Full service gas stations, hopping on a different schoolbus to ride to your friend’s house instead of home, putting the whole little league team in the bed of one pickup to ride to the DQ after the game – five or ten miles at 55 mph, the universal max speed limit.
Playing in the woods and riding bikes.
Drinking and driving. Everybody did it, parents, teens, everybody. I should have died in a car crash 50+ years ago.
The “shot guns” did not actually use a needle, but high pressure. The name terrified us though. Yep, no objections from parents. They were grateful that vaccines existed.
Sleeping over friends house all weekend , your parents knew exactly where you were …no cel phones
Coloring for hours in coloring books as a 12 yr old
Playing school, store etc. using your imagination…